Boing Boing » mobilehttp://boingboing.net
Brain candy for Happy MutantsSun, 02 Aug 2015 19:28:50 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2If phones were designed to please their owners, rather than corporationshttp://boingboing.net/2015/07/24/if-phones-were-designed-to-ple.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/07/24/if-phones-were-designed-to-ple.html#commentsFri, 24 Jul 2015 17:05:36 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=408599
Your smartphone was designed to deliver as much value as possible to its manufacturer, carrier and OS vendor, leaving behind the smallest amount of value possible while still making it a product that you'd be willing to pay for and use.]]>

Your smartphone was designed to deliver as much value as possible to its manufacturer, carrier and OS vendor, leaving behind the smallest amount of value possible while still making it a product that you'd be willing to pay for and use.

But in south China, the absence of patent and copyright enforcement, combined with enormous manufacturing and design capacity, means that phones for the domestic market are wildly innovative -- more than just endless variations on glass-distraction-rectangles. They're specialized and optimized for many different niches, and designed to beat the telcos at their own game, with as many as four SIM cages to allow you to take advantage of one carrier's unlimited loss-leader texting; another's loss-leader data plan, and so on.

The MIT Media Lab's Knotty Objects group has released a video featuring Bunny Huang, explaining this amazing parallel universe of anti-suck, with lessons the rest of the world can take from it.

Iwata was a teenager when Nintendo entered the video-game business. He desperately wanted into the industry, against his parents’ wishes, according to the book. In 1982, after working as a freelance game programmer, he joined HAL Laboratory, a Nintendo unit created in 1980 to make games for the parent company’s consoles. He eventually became president of HAL, before moving to Nintendo as head of corporate planning in 2000.
In 2002, the year Iwata took the post of president, Nintendo had annual sales of 555 billion yen ($4.5 billion).

The Wall Street Journal notes that his death places “the company’s leadership in question just months before it embarks on its first foray into mobile gaming.”

Mr. Iwata had been president since 2002 and led the introduction of successful products such as the Wii console. But in recent years, the company’s share price and market presence lagged behind with the rise of games on smartphones, a trend which Mr. Iwata was long reluctant to join.

His final major move as president came in March of this year, when he appeared at a news conference to say that the company would develop videogames for smartphones based on its classic characters such as Super Mario. Nintendo struck a partnership with DeNA Co., a Japanese game provider, under which the companies will exchange ownership stakes and set up a new mobile game platform.

“Nintendo is undergoing one of its biggest shifts ever,” Tokyo-based videogame consultant Serkan Toto told the WSJ. “Iwata-san’s passing away will make things a little problematic, but it is not unsolvable.”

Mashable has a roundup of fan reactions here, noting that Iwata was “well-loved by gaming fans for his constant involvement and interaction,” appearing “in countless digital press events, videos and other media, always with a smile and a winningly goofy attitude.”

The Nspire CX is one of the more robust graphing calculators on the market.

]]>

It's only Android 1.6, but still, that's impressive! Naturally, the sourcefiles are on Github.

The Nspire CX is one of the more robust graphing calculators on the market. Its 320x240 3.5" color screen, 100MB of storage, and 64MB of RAM are pretty paltry when compared to even the earliest Android phones (the original HTC G1 had 256MB of storage and 192MB of RAM). But it's apparently juuuuuust enough to run Android 1.6 "Donut." Josh Max has made rapid progress on his pet project, quickly adding keyboard support and Wi-Fi functionality via the add-on USB dongle.

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/24/texas-instruments-graphic-calc.html/feed0A 1,000-year-long-song for your phonehttp://boingboing.net/2015/06/23/a-1000-year-long-song-for-you.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/23/a-1000-year-long-song-for-you.html#commentsWed, 24 Jun 2015 06:04:15 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=399777
Paul writes, "Pogues founder Jem Finer created Longplayer in the late 1990's, a one-thousand-year-long piece of transcendent music which started playing at the stroke of midnight as the year 2000 started.]]>
Paul writes, "Pogues founder Jem Finer created Longplayer in the late 1990's, a one-thousand-year-long piece of transcendent music which started playing at the stroke of midnight as the year 2000 started. It's finally available as an app, so you can hear it whenever you want and contemplate what it will take to keep the song playing for the remaining 985 years it has to run."
]]>http://boingboing.net/2015/06/23/a-1000-year-long-song-for-you.html/feed0Amazon Fire Phone for $179, includes one year of Primehttp://boingboing.net/2015/06/23/amazon-fire-phone-for-179-in.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/23/amazon-fire-phone-for-179-in.html#commentsTue, 23 Jun 2015 15:58:03 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=399385

The Amazon Fire phone.

I'm tempted to buy this Amazon Fire Phone for $179. It's unlocked and it includes a year of Prime, which costs $99 a year.
I've been a Prime user for years, and if I buy this it will add a year to my Prime membership automatically. So the phone will really cost $79. It has a 4.7 inch screen, which is the same size as the iPhone 6. It runs Android apps, and my recent experience with Android phones has made me realize that they are pretty much the same as iPhones, and, in some cases, better.

I'd love to know what Fire Phone users think of it. Please post in the comments.]]>

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/23/amazon-fire-phone-for-179-in.html/feed0The snitch in your pocket: making sense of Stingrayshttp://boingboing.net/2015/06/20/the-snitch-in-your-pocket-mak.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/20/the-snitch-in-your-pocket-mak.html#commentsSat, 20 Jun 2015 15:12:54 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=399035
If you've been struggling to make sense of the stories about Stingrays (super-secretive cellular surveillance tech used by cops and governments) (previously) this week's Note to Self podcast does the best job I've yet seen (heard) of explaining them.]]>
If you've been struggling to make sense of the stories about Stingrays (super-secretive cellular surveillance tech used by cops and governments) (previously) this week's Note to Self podcast does the best job I've yet seen (heard) of explaining them.

It starts with the weirdest and most improbable part of the story: how the existence of Stingrays became widely known. Daniel Rigmaiden was a fraudster who was doing hard time, and he was convinced that he had been caught by some kind of unknown mobile surveillance device. He was smart, motivated and careful, and he had a lot of time on his hands, which he used to request more than 10,000 pages' worth of public records through Freedom of Information requests, from which he pieced together a brilliant and thorough report on Stingrays. He sent it to the ACLU's chief technologist, Christopher Soghoian (previously), who was able to carry the ball in ways that a convicted felon could not.

The Note to Self team collaborated with Jad Abumrad from Radiolab to discuss the implications of the state using secret tools to ascertain the location, movements and associations of entire populations without warrants or oversight, weighing the good and the bad, and talking to such sources as Bruce Schneier.

The little table that keeps the lid from crushing the pizza comes with an inset lens that fits in a pre-perforated hole in the box's side. The table inverts to form a phone-stand, and a marking inside the box indicates placement. Scannable codes on the side of the box let your phone stream videos to project, themed to match the box's livery, which comes in four genres.

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/18/pizza-box-becomes-a-phone-powe.html/feed0Trends in Chinese mobile UIshttp://boingboing.net/2015/06/17/trends-in-chinese-mobile-uis.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/17/trends-in-chinese-mobile-uis.html#commentsWed, 17 Jun 2015 16:00:57 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=398153
Last December, Dan Grover summarized the unique mobile app UI conventions he'd spotted since moving to China the summer before to work for Wechat, a Chinese mobile messaging app that also incorporates a wallet, Evernote-style functionality, a games platform, a people-finder, a song-matching service, and, of course, an email client.]]>
Last December, Dan Grover summarized the unique mobile app UI conventions he'd spotted since moving to China the summer before to work for Wechat, a Chinese mobile messaging app that also incorporates a wallet, Evernote-style functionality, a games platform, a people-finder, a song-matching service, and, of course, an email client.

Grover's work highlights many UI elements that have no analog in English-language/European UIs, including the "indeterminate badge" (an orange dot that means, "here is new content" or "your app is ready to be updated" or "you turned something off"); super-popular Android ROMs, skinnable apps, and a weird trend to turn on an assistive feature that seems like it would really get in the way:

Probably half of all iPhone users I see have the “Assistive Touch” option turned on, which makes a floating button appear on your screen at all times. This button, besides being annoying, emulates the hardware “home” button, as well as multitouch gestures for users whose impairments prevent them from performing them.

Nobody can give me a straight answer on why they, a person with two functioning hands and a full complement of motor neurons, enabled this obscure accessibility setting. Answers range from protecting their investment on the phone by not wearing out the physical home button, to it just being fun to play with when you’re bored.

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/17/trends-in-chinese-mobile-uis.html/feed0NSA wanted to hack the Android storehttp://boingboing.net/2015/05/21/nsa-wanted-to-hack-the-android.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/05/21/nsa-wanted-to-hack-the-android.html#commentsThu, 21 May 2015 13:14:09 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=389966
A newly published Snowden leak reveals that the NSA planned to hack the Android store so that it could covertly install malware on its targets' phones.]]>
A newly published Snowden leak reveals that the NSA planned to hack the Android store so that it could covertly install malware on its targets' phones.

The plan, codenamed IRRITANT HORN, involved exploiting a bug in a browser from Alibaba that is used by hundreds of millions of people, which the NSA kept a secret, leaving all those users vulnerable to attacks from criminals and other spy agencies.

Their goal, in tapping into UC Browser and also looking for larger app store vulnerabilities, was to collect data on suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets — and, in some cases, implant spyware on targeted smartphones.

The 2012 document shows that the surveillance agencies exploited the weaknesses in certain mobile apps in pursuit of their national security interests, but it appears they didn't alert the companies or the public to these weaknesses. That potentially put millions of users in danger of their data being accessed by other governments' agencies, hackers or criminals.

"All of this is being done in the name of providing safety and yet … Canadians or people around the world are put at risk," says the University of Ottawa's Michael Geist, one of Canada's foremost experts on internet law.

http://boingboing.net/2015/05/21/nsa-wanted-to-hack-the-android.html/feed0FBI replies to Stingray Freedom of Information request with 5,000 blank pageshttp://boingboing.net/2015/05/02/fbi-replies-to-stingray-freedo.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/05/02/fbi-replies-to-stingray-freedo.html#commentsSat, 02 May 2015 22:00:05 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=384804
The Stingray -- a fake cellphone tower that gathers identity/location information on everyone who passes it -- is the worst-kept secret in law enforcement, but that doesn't stop feds from going to absurd lengths to pretend they don't use them.]]>
The Stingray -- a fake cellphone tower that gathers identity/location information on everyone who passes it -- is the worst-kept secret in law enforcement, but that doesn't stop feds from going to absurd lengths to pretend they don't use them.

We know that police departments have to sign non-disclosure agreements when they buy Stingrays, and we've even seen them lie to judges about how they acquired their evidence to maintain their non-disclosure obligations. We've seen US Marshalls raid city cops to steal Stingray evidence before it could be introduced in court (even more dismaying -- it worked, and the case against the cops collapsed because the evidence had been disappeared down the Marshalls' memory hole).

The fun-loving feds at the FBI have turned over 5,000 pages of Stingray records in response to one set of Muckrock requests -- but they redacted virtually every word on every page first.

That's not to say there's nothing of interest left intact. A few pages explain the FBI's legal rationale for IMSI catcher deployment -- including the fact that the Patriot Act expanded the reach of pen register orders to include not just numbers dialed, but also the location of the phone itself. This allows the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to route around one of CALEA's (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) few limitations related to pen register orders: that service providers not be required to hand over subscriber location info.

In passing CALEA in 1994, Congress required providers to isolate and provide to the government certain information relating to telephone communications. At the same time that it created these obligations, it created an exception: carriers shall not provide law enforcement with "any information that may disclose the physical location of the subscriber" in response to a pen/trap order… By its very terms, this prohibition applies only to information collected by a provider and not to information collected directly by law enforcement authorities. Thus, CALEA does not bar the use of pen/trap orders to authorize the use of cell phone tracking devices used to locate targeted cell phones.

http://boingboing.net/2015/05/02/fbi-replies-to-stingray-freedo.html/feed0FBI's crypto backdoor plans require them to win the war on general purpose computinghttp://boingboing.net/2015/04/28/fbis-crypto-backdoor-plans-r.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/04/28/fbis-crypto-backdoor-plans-r.html#commentsWed, 29 Apr 2015 06:43:46 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=383495
The FBI wants backdoors in all your crypto, and UK Prime Minister David Cameron made backdoors an election promise, but as Stanford lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer writes, there's no way to effectively backdoor modern platforms without abolishing the whole idea of computers as we know them, replacing them with an imaginary and totalitarian computing ecosystem that does not exist and probably never will.]]>
The FBI wants backdoors in all your crypto, and UK Prime Minister David Cameron made backdoors an election promise, but as Stanford lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer writes, there's no way to effectively backdoor modern platforms without abolishing the whole idea of computers as we know them, replacing them with an imaginary and totalitarian computing ecosystem that does not exist and probably never will.

Mayer gives the example of how stopping Android users from using crypto would require the abolition of third-party app stores, rolling back the state of the art in Web-based apps, introducing kill-switches to the platform that lets Google delete your apps and the data associated with them, and preventing jailbreaking at all costs.

He mentions that the same is true for Ios, though that's not exactly right -- it's a felony to jailbreak many Ios devices (Iphones, but not Ipads, are temporarily exempted from this thanks to a Copyright Office ruling that expires this year), and it's a felony to run a third-party Ios app store and supply jailbreaking tools for Ios. DRM-locked ecosystems are already designed to prevent users from running code that their users desire, and so it's conceptually a lot easier to understand how a government could simply say to all those companies -- Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Nest, John Deere, etc -- that the law required them to only approve apps with backdoors and then help the companies with their existing project of vigorously prosecuting jailbreak tool-makers, and get a much more airtight seal around users' ability to use good crypto.

One option: require Google to police its app store for strong cryptography. Another option: mandate a notice-and-takedown system, where the government is responsible for spotting secure apps, and Google has a grace period to remove them. Either alternative would, of course, be entirely unacceptable to the technology sector—the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system is widely reviled, and present federal law (CDA 230) disfavors intermediary liability.

This hypothetical is already beyond the realm of political feasibility, but keep going. Assume the federal government sticks Google with intermediary liability. How will Google (or the government) distinguish between apps that have strong cryptography and apps that have backdoored cryptography?

There isn’t a good solution. Auditing app installation bundles, or even requiring developers to hand over source code, would not be sufficient. Apps can trivially download and incorporate new code. Auditing running apps would add even more complexity. And, at any rate, both static and dynamic analysis are unsolved challenges—just look at how much trouble Google has had identifying malware and knockoff apps.

Continue with the hypothetical, though. Imagine that Google could successfully banish secure encryption apps from the official Google Play store. What about apps that are loaded from another app store? The government could feasibly regulate some competitors, like the Amazon Appstore. How, though, would it reach international, free, open source app repositories like F-Droid or Fossdroid? What about apps that a user directly downloads and installs (“sideloads”) from a developer’s website?

The only solution is an app kill switch.3 (Google’s euphemism is “Remote Application Removal.”) Whenever the government discovers a strong encryption app, it would compel Google to nuke the app from Android phones worldwide. That level of government intrusion—reaching into personal devices to remove security software—certainly would not be well received. It raises serious Fourth Amendment issues, since it could be construed as a search of the device or a seizure of device functionality and app data.4 What’s more, the collateral damage would be extensive; innocent users of the app would lose their data.

Designing an effective app kill switch also isn’t so easy. The concept is feasible for app store downloads, since those apps are tagged with a consistent identifier. But a naïve kill switch design is trivial to circumvent with a sideloaded app. The developer could easily generate a random application identifier for each download.5

Google would have to build a much more sophisticated kill switch, scanning apps for prohibited traits. Think antivirus, but for detecting and removing apps that the user wants. That’s yet another unsolved technical challenge, yet another objectionable intrusion into personal devices, and yet another practice with constitutional vulnerability.

The device bypasses the secure wipe triggered by ten bad guesses by "aggressively cutting the power after each failed PIN attempt, but before the attempt has been synchronized to flash memory."

Further research suggests this could be the issue detailed in CVE-2014-4451 but this has yet to be confirmed.

]]>

The IP Box costs less than £200 and can guess all possible four-digit passwords in 111 hours.

The device bypasses the secure wipe triggered by ten bad guesses by "aggressively cutting the power after each failed PIN attempt, but before the attempt has been synchronized to flash memory."

Further research suggests this could be the issue detailed in CVE-2014-4451 but this has yet to be confirmed. We plan to test the same attack on an 8.2 device and will update with our progress. In the mean time, our advice to all is ensure you have a sufficiently complex password applied to your device rather than a PIN.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/19/brute-force-iphone-password-gu.html/feed0An Internet of Things that do what they're toldhttp://boingboing.net/2015/02/19/an-internet-of-things-that-do.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/19/an-internet-of-things-that-do.html#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 18:13:09 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=365984
California's phone bricking bill seems to have reduced thefts in the short run, but at the cost of giving dirty cops and wily criminals the power to wipe-and-brick your phone at will.]]>
California's phone bricking bill seems to have reduced thefts in the short run, but at the cost of giving dirty cops and wily criminals the power to wipe-and-brick your phone at will.

I've just written an editorial for O'Reilly Radar on designing an Internet of Things that aren't a godsend to authoritarian creeps and relentless crooks -- without sacrificing usability, elegance and security.

In other words: as soon as you create a back door on phones, you create the possibility that someone will abuse it. We don’t know how to make back doors that only good guys can go through. And that’s before we get to the security issues that arise from standardizing telco-controlled back doors in phones that are sent to countries where the rule of law is compromised or nonexistent. A year ago, Ukrainians who attended the Euromaidan demonstrations in Kiev had their mobile
phone IDs harvested by state security services using Stingray devices, who then ordered the national carriers to use them to look up their mobile numbers and broadcast a chilling message by SMS: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”

What happens when we give the state the power to brick any phone without user intervention? After San Francisco BART officers were caught murdering a rider by passengers who recorded and transmitted footage using their mobile phones, the public transit operator tried to shut down mobile service on its property. Hardly a day goes by without stories of cops who illegally seize witnesses’s mobile phones after committing illegal acts — what are the consequences of creating a law enforcement remote-wipe-and-brick mandate for those devices?

Imagine a user-centric, data-centric, freedom-centric version of this security measure: all devices would have to be sold with encrypted filesystems by default, so that users whose phones are lost or stolen can be sure that their data is intact, that their bank accounts won’t be raided, that the correspondence with their lawyers and doctors and lovers won’t be read, that their search history and photos won’t be exposed.

http://boingboing.net/2015/02/19/an-internet-of-things-that-do.html/feed0Apple won't let EFF release a DRM-free apphttp://boingboing.net/2015/01/09/apple-wont-let-eff-release-a.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/09/apple-wont-let-eff-release-a.html#commentsFri, 09 Jan 2015 23:00:25 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=357332
EFF has released its mobile app to help people join in important, timely struggles, but you can't get it for your Iphone or Ipad, because Apple insists that EFF use DRM, and this is contrary to everything it stands for.]]>
EFF has released its mobile app to help people join in important, timely struggles, but you can't get it for your Iphone or Ipad, because Apple insists that EFF use DRM, and this is contrary to everything it stands for.

In a petition, EFF calls out Apple's incredibly abusive, one-sided developer "agreement" and calls on developers and Apple users to join a campaign to get Apple to give developers the freedom to release their creations on more liberal terms.

This is usually where a vocal segment of Apple defenders chime in and say, "If you don't like it, don't make Apple software." Of course, that's exactly what EFF has done. But human beings' relations with corporations are not limited to opening or closing our wallets. A critical piece of how markets work is through pressure brought to bear by public interest groups and their supporters.

The outrageous terms in Apple's iOS agreement undermine the rights of developers and the security of their users. Apple should rewrite these terms to respect the developers and users that make the platform so popular.

*
Ban iOS developers from jailbreaking an Apple device, or even enabling others to do so.

*
Require Apple to approve every security update, which means that unaddressed security bugs could linger and leave users at risk.

*
Wrap every app in the Apple store with unnecessary DRM, which limits what users can do with their apps even if the code is published as free software.

*
Developers shouldn't have to sacrifice their rights to speak and innovate freely just to bring their applications to millions of Apple users. Amend your terms to respect free speech, security, and innovation.

http://boingboing.net/2015/01/09/apple-wont-let-eff-release-a.html/feed0Bridging gongkai and free/open sourcehttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/30/bridging-gongkai-and-freeopen.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/30/bridging-gongkai-and-freeopen.html#commentsTue, 30 Dec 2014 12:37:34 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=355620
Bunnie Huang and his team have set out to fully reverse-engineer and document a cheap Chinese Mediatek MT6260. mobile-phone board -- licensed in the complex, informal regime of "gongkai," through which lots of theoretically confidential information is published, but some critical pieces are withheld.]]>
Bunnie Huang and his team have set out to fully reverse-engineer and document a cheap Chinese Mediatek MT6260. mobile-phone board -- licensed in the complex, informal regime of "gongkai," through which lots of theoretically confidential information is published, but some critical pieces are withheld.

Bunnie and co are building a full free/open toolchain for the MT6260, which retails for $3. They're trying to bridge the two different kinds of "open" ecosystems, one formalized and western, the other informal and Chinese. In the notes that accompany his presentation at 31C3, he details the background, practicalities, and ongoing challenges of his project. It's a fascinating post.

This fuzzy, gray relationship between companies and entrepreneurs is just one manifestation of a much broader cultural gap between the East and the West. The West has a “broadcast” view of IP and ownership: good ideas and innovation are credited to a clearly specified set of authors or inventors, and society pays them a royalty for their initiative and good works. China has a “network” view of IP and ownership: the far-sight necessary to create good ideas and innovations is attained by standing on the shoulders of others, and as such there is a network of people who trade these ideas as favors among each other. In a system with such a loose attitude toward IP, sharing with the network is necessary as tomorrow it could be your friend standing on your shoulders, and you’ll be looking to them for favors. This is unlike the West, where rule of law enables IP to be amassed over a long period of time, creating impenetrable monopoly positions. It’s good for the guys on top, but tough for the upstarts.

This brings us to the situation we have today: Apple and Google are building amazing phones of outstanding quality, and start-ups can only hope to build an appcessory for their ecosystem. I’ve reviewed business plans of over a hundred hardware startups by now, and most of them are using overpriced chipsets built using antiquated process technologies as their foundation. I’m no exception to this rule – we use the Freescale i.MX6 for Novena, which is neither the cheapest nor the fastest chip on the market, but it is the one chip where anyone can freely download almost complete documentation and anyone can buy it on Digikey. This parallel constraint of scarce documentation and scarce supply for cutting edge technology forces Western hardware entrepreneurs to look primarily at Arduino, Beaglebone and Raspberry Pi as starting points for their good ideas.

Chinese entrepreneurs, on the other hand, churn out new phones at an almost alarming pace. Phone models change on a seasonal basis. Entrepreneurs experiment all the time, integrating whacky features into phones, such as cigarette lighters, extra-large battery packs (that can be used to charge another phone), huge buttons (for the visually impaired), reduced buttons (to give to children as emergency-call phones), watch form factors, and so forth. This is enabled because very small teams of engineers can obtain complete design packages for working phones – case, board, and firmware – allowing them to fork the design and focus only on the pieces they really care about.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/30/bridging-gongkai-and-freeopen.html/feed0Beautiful Japanese Firefox OS phone in a transparent casehttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/24/beautiful-japanese-firefox-os.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/24/beautiful-japanese-firefox-os.html#commentsWed, 24 Dec 2014 23:00:42 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=355216
Al sends us the Fx0, a "beautiful mid-range phone running Firefox OS announced in Japan today by KDDI, one of Japan's largest mobile phone companies."

Unlike earlier (disappointing) Firefox OS devices, this one has a much higher spec and might be powerful enough to actually run the OS.

]]>
Al sends us the Fx0, a "beautiful mid-range phone running Firefox OS announced in Japan today by KDDI, one of Japan's largest mobile phone companies."

Unlike earlier (disappointing) Firefox OS devices, this one has a much higher spec and might be powerful enough to actually run the OS. It also comes in a gorgeous, transparent plastic case (for which I am a perennial sucker -- I really miss my transparent Palm Pilot!).

Designer Tokujin Yoshioka has impeccable credentials, including a design that made it into MOMA.

The Fx0 marks a break from Mozilla's established strategy of making the cheapest possible phones and dares to stray into the middle of the smartphone price and spec range. At a cost of 50,000 yen (roughly $420), this smartphone is significantly more expensive than the average Firefox OS handset, but it seeks to justify that price rise with its good looks and greater capabilities. NFC, LTE, and other widely adopted features are making their Firefox OS debut on the Fx0, making it a much more competitive and compelling proposition for buyers that are less constrained by their budget. Still, Firefox OS shouldn't be confused as any sort of competitor to the smartphone high end, and the base specs of the Fx0 are relatively underwhelming: a 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 processor, 1.5GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, and a 2,370mAh battery.

The device is built by LG, and it embodies the next big step for Firefox OS, but KDDI is the company in charge of its fate. Together with Mozilla, the Japanese carrier hopes to promote the concept of "a new worldwide WoT (Web of Things) experience, which connects various objects using Web technology regardless of PC or smartphone." KDDI has created a dedicated Fx sub-site and is encouraging developers to get involved and build out the Firefox OS software ecosystem, marking a significant investment into helping the platform prosper and grow. The Fx0 goes on limited sale this Thursday, December 25th, and will be available across Japan from January 6th. It's unlikely that the custom KDDI design will ever go global, but it certainly sets a beautiful tone for future devices in the Firefox OS family.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/24/beautiful-japanese-firefox-os.html/feed0Blackphone announces privacy-oriented app storehttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/10/blackphone-announces-privacy-o.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/10/blackphone-announces-privacy-o.html#commentsWed, 10 Dec 2014 23:00:35 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=352480
Blackphone, the Swiss-based, secure hardware/OS mobile phone from PGP inventor Phil Zimmerman has announced that it will provide a store with privacy-oriented apps that are sandboxed to minimize data-misuse.]]>
Blackphone, the Swiss-based, secure hardware/OS mobile phone from PGP inventor Phil Zimmerman has announced that it will provide a store with privacy-oriented apps that are sandboxed to minimize data-misuse.

The Blackphone app store will be available in January and will monitor apps to make sure they do not snoop on users.

“We’ll have a few degrees of vetting,” Blackphone chief executive Toby Weir-Jones told the Guardian. “We’ll validate that the apps will do what they intend – call it the Apple model. If you have an app to manage your social media accounts and it wanted access to your microphone and your camera we might ask why and get on a first screening.”

Several apps have been caught spying on users through leaky permissions systems, accessing unconnected features of smartphones, including an Android torch app that silently sent user location and device data to advertisers, which sparked and investigation and subsequent fine from the US data privacy regulator.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/10/blackphone-announces-privacy-o.html/feed0Turn a balloon into a phone case in secondshttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/04/turn-a-balloon-into-a-phone-ca.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/04/turn-a-balloon-into-a-phone-ca.html#commentsThu, 04 Dec 2014 20:00:45 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=351229
Woosung An demonstrates an excellent technique for adding a layer of rubber protection to your phone in seconds, by deflating a balloon around it.]]>

Woosung An demonstrates an excellent technique for adding a layer of rubber protection to your phone in seconds, by deflating a balloon around it.

As Make notes, there's a variant on this performed by conjurers Daniel Garcia and Dan White that completely seals the phone in the balloon.
]]>

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/04/turn-a-balloon-into-a-phone-ca.html/feed0NSA leak reveal plans to subvert mobile network security around the worldhttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/04/nsa-leak-reveal-plans-to-subve.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/04/nsa-leak-reveal-plans-to-subve.html#commentsThu, 04 Dec 2014 19:23:13 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=351379
The NSA's AURORAGOLD program -- revealed in newly released Snowden docs -- used plundered internal emails to compromise nearly every mobile carrier in the world, and show that the agency had planned to introduce vulnerabilities into future improvements into mobile security.]]>
The NSA's AURORAGOLD program -- revealed in newly released Snowden docs -- used plundered internal emails to compromise nearly every mobile carrier in the world, and show that the agency had planned to introduce vulnerabilities into future improvements into mobile security.

One major target of the NSA's infiltration and sabotage program is the London-based GSM Association, the trade body that American, European and other tech companies and carriers use to set and maintain mobile networking standards.

Undermining security is the most controversial type of NSA dirty tricks, the thing that frustrates industry players and friendly governments alike. The revelations about the Bullrun/Edgehill sabotage programs have opened rifts between the NSA and the security community (including the US government's National Institute for Standards and Technology, NIST, which was targeted by the program).

By covertly monitoring GSMA working groups in a bid to identify and exploit security vulnerabilities, the NSA has placed itself into direct conflict with the mission of the National Institute for Standards and Technology, or NIST, the U.S. government agency responsible for recommending cybersecurity standards in the United States. NIST recently handed out a grant of more than $800,000 to GSMA so that the organization could research ways to address “security and privacy challenges” faced by users of mobile devices.

The revelation that the trade group has been targeted for surveillance may reignite deep-seated tensions between NIST and NSA that came to the fore following earlier Snowden disclosures. Last year, NIST was forced to urge people not to use an encryption standard it had previously approved after it emerged NSA had apparently covertly worked to deliberately weaken it.

Jennifer Huergo, a NIST spokewoman, told The Intercept that the agency was “not aware of any activities by NSA related to the GSMA.” Huergo said that NIST would continue to work towards “bringing industry together with privacy and consumer advocates to jointly create a robust marketplace of more secure, easy-to-use, privacy-enhancing solutions.”

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/04/nsa-leak-reveal-plans-to-subve.html/feed0Crowdfunding Jolla, a GNU/Linux-powered high-spec tablethttp://boingboing.net/2014/11/19/crowdfunding-jolla-a-gnulinu.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/11/19/crowdfunding-jolla-a-gnulinu.html#commentsThu, 20 Nov 2014 06:00:16 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=346970
It runs an OS called Sailfish that can use Android apps as well its own native apps, and was created by a team with a bunch of senior Nokia refugees on it.]]>

It runs an OS called Sailfish that can use Android apps as well its own native apps, and was created by a team with a bunch of senior Nokia refugees on it.

The tablet itself is super high-spec and competitively priced (and total vapourware at this point, caveat emptor). The OS is built on GNU/Linux with the Qt application framework. The company advertises itself as privacy-friendly and promises never to sell or share your data and not to build in any intentional back-doors.

I took a flutter and pre-ordered one.

We want you to tell us how you want your Jolla Tablet to be. It doesn’t matter who you are, you’ll get your voice heard in our community forum together.jolla.com. It’s here that users can suggest new features for Sailfish OS, as well as discuss ideas with the Jolla Sailors (our development team). Our community votes on whether they’d like to see proposed ideas developed further. Anything that has been voted on by the community is prioritised by the Jolla Sailors.

Our community is a vital part of the process and plays a huge role in making something that is people-made. We already have a solid track record after implementing four out of the eight most voted features to our first product, the Jolla smartphone, during 2014.

http://boingboing.net/2014/11/19/crowdfunding-jolla-a-gnulinu.html/feed0Whatsapp integrates Moxie Marlinspike's Textsecure end-to-end cryptohttp://boingboing.net/2014/11/18/whatsapp-integrates-moxie-marl.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/11/18/whatsapp-integrates-moxie-marl.html#commentsTue, 18 Nov 2014 19:54:56 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=346822
It's the largest-ever deployment of end-to-end crypto, and assuming they didn't add any back-doors or make critical errors, this means that hundreds of millions of users can now communicate without being spied upon by governments, crooks, cops, spies or voyeurs.]]>
It's the largest-ever deployment of end-to-end crypto, and assuming they didn't add any back-doors or make critical errors, this means that hundreds of millions of users can now communicate without being spied upon by governments, crooks, cops, spies or voyeurs.

Marlinspike's Textsecure has an impeccable reputation as a secure platform, and Whatsapp founder Jan Koum attributes his desire to add security to his users' conversations to his experiences with the surveillance state while growing up in Soviet Ukraine. However, without any independent security audit or (even better) source-code publication, we have to take the company's word that it has done the right thing and that it's done it correctly.

In its initial phase, though, Whatsapp’s messaging encryption is limited to Android, and doesn’t yet apply to group messages, photos or video messages. Marlinspike says that Whatsapp plans to expand its Textsecure rollout into those other features and other platforms, including Apple’s iOS, soon. He wouldn’t specify an exact time frame, and Whatsapp staffers declined to comment on the new encryption features. Marlinspike says the Textsecure implementation has been in the works for six months, since shortly after Whatsapp was acquired by Facebook last February.

Whatsapp’s Android users alone represent a massive new user base for end-to-end encrypted messaging: Whatsapp’s page in the Google Play store lists more than 500 million downloads. Textsecure had previously been installed on only around 10 million gadgets running the Cyanogen mod variant of Android and about 500,000 other devices.

The only encrypted messaging system that compares in size is Apple’s iMessage, which also claims to use a version of end-to-end encryption. Compared with Textsecure, however, Apple’s iMessage security has some serious shortcomings. iMessage doesn’t track which devices’ cryptographic keys are associated with a certain user, so Apple could simply create a new key the user wasn’t aware of to start intercepting his or her messages. Additionally, many users unwittingly back up their stored iMessages to Apple’s iCloud, which renders any end-to-end encryption moot. Plus, unlike Textsecure, iMessage doesn’t use a feature called “forward secrecy” that creates a new encryption key for each message sent. This means that anyone who collects a user’s encrypted messages and successfully cracks a user’s key can decrypt all their communications, not just the one message that uses that key.

http://boingboing.net/2014/11/18/whatsapp-integrates-moxie-marl.html/feed0Back to the Future Delorean dashboard phone-casehttp://boingboing.net/2014/11/11/back-to-the-future-delorean-da.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/11/11/back-to-the-future-delorean-da.html#commentsTue, 11 Nov 2014 14:00:15 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=344848
The Back to the Future Delorean dashboard phone-case ($16.26) fits most recent smartphones, and the image is transferred using 3D vacuum printing to produce a wraparound effect.]]>
The Back to the Future Delorean dashboard phone-case ($16.26) fits most recent smartphones, and the image is transferred using 3D vacuum printing to produce a wraparound effect. (via Geeky Merch)
]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/11/11/back-to-the-future-delorean-da.html/feed0CHP officer who stole and shared nude photos of traffic-stop victim claims "it's a game"http://boingboing.net/2014/10/25/chp-officer-who-stole-and-shar.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/25/chp-officer-who-stole-and-shar.html#commentsSun, 26 Oct 2014 03:00:56 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=340747
Officer Sean Harrington of Martinez California Highway Patrol says that when he stole nude photos from the cell phone of a woman he'd traffic-stopped and then shared them with other CHP officers, that he was just playing "a game" that is widespead in the force.]]>
Officer Sean Harrington of Martinez California Highway Patrol says that when he stole nude photos from the cell phone of a woman he'd traffic-stopped and then shared them with other CHP officers, that he was just playing "a game" that is widespead in the force.

Text messages obtained by the newspaper also show the kind of exchanges going on. In one exchange involving Harrington and another officer, Harrington said, “Just rerun a favor down the road buddy” with a smiley face.

Suspicions that the photos were stolen were first raised when the suspect said she synced her phone after her arrest and noticed when six photos were sent from her phone to another account.

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/25/chp-officer-who-stole-and-shar.html/feed0Wouldn't it be great if a billboard could actually read your mind?http://boingboing.net/2014/10/24/wouldnt-it-be-great-if-a-bil.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/24/wouldnt-it-be-great-if-a-bil.html#commentsFri, 24 Oct 2014 22:00:04 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=340443
Said no one, ever. Except, apparently not: the "data scientists" of Posterscope are excited that EE -- a joint venture of T-Mobile and Orange -- will spy on all their users' mobile data to "give profound insights...that were never possible before"

Said no one, ever. Except, apparently not: the "data scientists" of Posterscope are excited that EE -- a joint venture of T-Mobile and Orange -- will spy on all their users' mobile data to "give profound insights...that were never possible before"

It's Big Data snakeoil at its creepy, tone deaf finest. After all, if you can't trust a phone company (or better yet, two phone companies!), who can you trust?
]]>

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/24/wouldnt-it-be-great-if-a-bil.html/feed0Darkmatter: a secure Paranoid Android version that hides from attackershttp://boingboing.net/2014/10/15/darkmatter-a-secure-paranoid.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/15/darkmatter-a-secure-paranoid.html#commentsThu, 16 Oct 2014 03:00:58 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=338254
Stock Android phones with the Darkmatter OS use encrypted storage, OS-level app controls, and secure messaging by default, but if the phone thinks it's under attack, it dismounts all the encrypted stuff and reboots as a stock Android phone with no obvious hints that its owner has anything hidden on it.]]>
Stock Android phones with the Darkmatter OS use encrypted storage, OS-level app controls, and secure messaging by default, but if the phone thinks it's under attack, it dismounts all the encrypted stuff and reboots as a stock Android phone with no obvious hints that its owner has anything hidden on it.

It's still in beta, unveiled today at the Hack the Box conference in Kuala Lumpur.

The Blackphone has a problem. The mere fact of holding one in your hand advertises to the world that you're using a Blackphone. That might not be a big problem for people who can safely be assumed to have access to sensitive information—politicians, security contractors, say—but if you're a journalist investigating your own corrupt government or a dissident fearful of arrest, the Blackphone is a really bad idea. Using such a phone is advertising that you have sensitive material that you're trying to keep secret, and is an invitation to break out the rubber hoses.

That's what led a team of security researchers to develop DarkMatter, unveiled today at the Hack In The Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur. DarkMatter is a secure Android fork, but unlike Blackphone and its custom hardware, DarkMatter is a secure Android that runs on regular Android phones (including the Galaxy S4 and Nexus 5) and which, at first glance, looks just like it's stock Android. The special sauce of DarkMatter is secure encrypted storage that selected apps can transparently access. If the firmware believes it's under attack, the secure storage will be silently dismounted, and the phone will appear, to all intents and purposes, to be a regular non-secure device.

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/15/darkmatter-a-secure-paranoid.html/feed0Kids who sext more likely to be comfortable with their sexualityhttp://boingboing.net/2014/10/09/kids-who-sext-more-likely-to-b.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/09/kids-who-sext-more-likely-to-b.html#commentsThu, 09 Oct 2014 19:00:36 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=336831
In Longitudinal Association Between Teen Sexting and Sexual Behavior [PDF] (Pediatrics, Temple & Choi), a 6-year study of 1,000 diverse American teens finds that sexting is common, not correlated with future risky behaviors, and correlated with overall comfort with sexuality.

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/09/kids-who-sext-more-likely-to-b.html/feed0$35 Firefox OS smartphone - back to the drawing boardhttp://boingboing.net/2014/10/07/35-firefox-os-smartphone-ba.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/07/35-firefox-os-smartphone-ba.html#commentsWed, 08 Oct 2014 03:00:31 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=336316
Ron Amadeo's review of the much-heralded Cloud FX phone, a $35 smartphone for the "rest of the world," paints a gloomy picture of a poorly thought through first outing.]]>
Ron Amadeo's review of the much-heralded Cloud FX phone, a $35 smartphone for the "rest of the world," paints a gloomy picture of a poorly thought through first outing.

Amadeo's found the Intex Cloud FX underpowered, poorly built, buggy, and nearly impossible to use -- from its terrible keyboard to the fact that it lost the current time (and with it, the ability to parse SSL certificates and perform other vital functions) every time the battery died, and could not re-establish the time without access to a live cellular connection (wifi wasn't good enough). The camera is so terrible as to be pointless.

It's a shame, as I had very high hopes for the device, and want Firefox OS to succeed -- it's got best-of-breed privacy protection, and the mission of putting free/open code into the first computers that the world majority gets to own is incredibly important and noble. But the Cloud FX is also the first attempt to build an ultra-low-cost smartphone, and we can hope that subsequent manufacturers learn from Intex's mistakes and take more care in speccing and building their Firefox mobiles (and that they won't be scared off by the inevitable failure of the Cloud FX).

Navigating webpages is a nightmare. The problem isn't just that the phone is slow, it's that scrolling is nearly impossible. A lot of times the phone is busy, and scrolling doesn't do anything. When it does scroll, you'll find the rest of the page often isn't loaded and you'll get a gray screen that takes a few seconds to be loaded into memory. The other problem is that scrolling is often interpreted as pressing on a link. This, combined with the speed of the device and the often-frozen scrolling, means the Cloud FX is frequently doing things you don't want—and doing them very slowly.

The performance of the Cloud FX really cannot be understated. Screen taps sometimes take seconds to register. Firefox OS has a recent apps screen, but there is never any free memory, so nothing other than the current app is ever open. During particularly slow freak-outs, the screen will just turn black. If the phone falls asleep, or the alarm pops up, or a phone call comes in, your app closes and you lose your progress. Even something as simple as opening a folder of apps has a load time measured in seconds.

If Firefox OS was a little more considerate of the ultra-low-end specs of the Cloud FX, things wouldn't be so bad. A big part of the problem is merely that the OS clearly isn't targeted for something this slow. Being able to disable images and JavaScript in the browser would be a great first step, but Firefox OS offers no way to do that. We couldn't find an app or alternative browser, either. Android deals with low memory by saving the state of an app if it is going to be closed due to low memory, but Firefox doesn't appear to have any such abilities. Users will frequently lose data if they try to bounce from app to app.

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/07/35-firefox-os-smartphone-ba.html/feed0Mobile malware infections race through Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolutionhttp://boingboing.net/2014/10/03/mobile-malware-infections-race.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/03/mobile-malware-infections-race.html#commentsFri, 03 Oct 2014 19:00:12 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=335634
The protesters are dependent on mobile apps to coordinate their huge, seemingly unstoppable uprising, and someone -- maybe the Politburo, maybe a contractor -- has released virulent Ios and Android malware into their cohort, and the pathogens are blazing through their electronic ecosystem.]]>
The protesters are dependent on mobile apps to coordinate their huge, seemingly unstoppable uprising, and someone -- maybe the Politburo, maybe a contractor -- has released virulent Ios and Android malware into their cohort, and the pathogens are blazing through their electronic ecosystem.

The Android malware spreads via Whatsapp messages; the Ios version -- "Xsser Mrat" -- is spread through Cydia, an alternative to Apple's App Store. They masquerade as messenger apps from the activist group Code4HK. The Apple version uses the same command server as the Chinese version of the Xsser cross-site scripting hacking tool.

Once installed, the malware -- a form of RAT, or Remote Access Trojan -- can access the devices' messages, passwords, photos, videos, and keystrokes. Additionally, the Android version can send messages, place calls, upload files and run other local commands.

Like other iOS RATs, this malware requires that the device be jailbroken in order for it to be installed—it’s not something that users download from the Apple app store. But that step may have been aided by the prevalence of public jailbreaks for iOS devices in China to gain access to local applications not published through Apple’s iTunes store, thanks largely to Pangu. Xsser mRAT installs through Cydia, an alternative to the iTunes store for jailbroken devices, as a Debian .deb package file.

Both the Android and iOS mRATs can pull huge swaths of data from the infected devices: hardware and operating system information, address books, call logs, SMS messages, location data, and photos, for starters. The Android version can also record audio, place calls, execute other commands on the device, and download files from a URL or directly from the remote attacker’s computer.

The iOS mRAT, according to Lacoon researchers, can also gain access to passwords and usernames stored in the iOS keychain and the local archives for Tencent’s Mobile QQ, a popular Chinese messaging application. The breakdown of Xsser mRAT also found a number of unimplemented commands in the code, indicating that the Trojan is still under development and additional features may be pushed out to infected devices. Included among the referenced, but unimplemented, commands were features already in the Android mRAT—sending SMS messages, placing phone calls, running local commands, and uploading files to the device.

Identifying exactly who’s behind these mRAT Trojans isn’t easy. The servers for their CnC network are virtual Windows servers hosted on a Chinese virtual private server (VPS) service, the identity of which is s hidden behind a “whois protection service” operated by Jiangsu Bangning Science and Technology Co. Ltd—a Chinese ISP and domain registration services company. Similar tactics have been used by other cybercriminals based out of China—and other countries—in the past.

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/03/mobile-malware-infections-race.html/feed0CEO of stalkerware company arrestedhttp://boingboing.net/2014/09/30/ceo-of-stalkerware-company-arr.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/09/30/ceo-of-stalkerware-company-arr.html#commentsTue, 30 Sep 2014 15:00:55 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=334729
Hammad Akbar, a Pakistani national and CEO of Invocode, marketers of Stealthgenie, was arrested in LA on Saturday and charged with a variety of offenses related to making, marketing and selling "interception devices."

]]>
Hammad Akbar, a Pakistani national and CEO of Invocode, marketers of Stealthgenie, was arrested in LA on Saturday and charged with a variety of offenses related to making, marketing and selling "interception devices."

Akbar's product, Stealthgenie, was mobile malware for Blackberries, Ios and Android devices. Once installed, it allowed users to track their victims' locations, intercept their voicemail and SMSes; and plunder their devices for videos, photos, calendars, address book items, etc. According to the Assistant AG who oversaw the arrest, "Apps like Stealthgenie are expressly designed for use by stalkers and domestic abusers who want to know every detail of a victim's personal life -- all without the victim's knowledge." Akbar is the first stalkerware vendor to be arrested in the US for marketing products like Stealthgenie.

The government said that Akbar, as CEO of InvoCode that marketed the spyware online, produced an app that works on the Blackberry, the iPhone, and phones running Android. Akbar is accused of conspiracy, sale of a surreptitious interception device, advertisement of a known interception device, and advertising a device as a surreptitious interception device. He was arrested in Los Angeles on Saturday. The spyware was hosted on servers run by Amazon Web Services in Ashburn, Virginia, the government said.

http://boingboing.net/2014/09/30/ceo-of-stalkerware-company-arr.html/feed0Kickstarting a prismatic, hat-brim mounted heads-up display for your phonehttp://boingboing.net/2014/09/29/kickstarting-a-prismatic-hat.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/09/29/kickstarting-a-prismatic-hat.html#commentsMon, 29 Sep 2014 16:00:46 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=334477
The Hattrickwear is an improbable ball-cap designed to mount your phone horizontally along your eyeline with a mirror and prism that keeps your screen in your field of vision all the time.]]>
The Hattrickwear is an improbable ball-cap designed to mount your phone horizontally along your eyeline with a mirror and prism that keeps your screen in your field of vision all the time.

The hat is somehow balanced to minimize the discomfort (if not the silliness!) of this arrangement. The project's creators promise "HattrickWear will make you the center of attention wherever you go." $100 gets you the hat and its stuff. The creator has no information in his bio about his previous accomplishments, which is my minimum standard for backing any crowdfunding project -- if someone hasn't finished anything that can be enumerated, then that person should probably go and do that before asking for strangers' money to do something else.

But it is a magnificently weird idea.

HattrickWear is a cool specially designed hat with an extension where you can plug your mobile phone easily, then utilize its screen and camera through a pair of reflecting prisms. You can easily interact with your mobile by swiping the screen, voice commands and gestures or even by using our simple remote control.

The hat is designed with a unique structure so it balances all the weight around your head comfortably. The prisms are custom-made very light weight and easy to attach and adjust. They’re big enough to show your creativity but without bothering your vision. It works with all mobile phones; it opens endless possibilities for you to show your creativity in all forms & formats by utilizing a wealth of apps and APIs available on these platforms.